What Would Luddites Say About Waymo Cars?
An interview with technology critic and author of Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant
I’ve been getting a ton of calls lately from media outlets, covering a recent highly circulated set of videos in which a few skateboarders and other San Francisco locals attack and torch a driverless cab — an autonomous vehicle owned by Waymo, which is Google’s robot car company. They wanted to speak with me, as author of the book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, about the fact that people are now throwing skateboards at the Google Car.
Of course, when I wrote Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, I wasn’t arguing that we should attack technologies or the people who use them; I was lamenting at the way these potentially liberating technologies had been turned against people and places — and the fact that people felt compelled to take up arms against them in return.
At first, Google was just two college students taking down big bad corporate Yahoo with a bottom-up algorithm. And because a few billion dollars a year of profit wasn’t enough for its investors, they pivoted to become one of the extractive and super-profitable mega-companies that made San Francisco too expensive for the people who already lived there.
